page_title: Book of Genesis
section_title: Judaism's weekly Torah portions in the Book of Genesis
hierarchical_section_title: Book of Genesis / Judaism's weekly Torah portions in the Book of Genesis
caption_attribution_description: This is a part of a scan of an historical document: Title: Schedelsche Weltchronik or Nuremberg Chronicle
context_page_description: The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, is an account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, Israel's ancestors, and the origins of the Jewish people. Its Hebrew name is the same as its first word, Bereshit.
  It is divisible into two parts, the primeval history and the ancestral history. The primeval history sets out the author's concepts of the nature of the deity and of humankind's relationship with its maker: God creates a world which is good and fit for mankind, but when man corrupts it with sin God decides to destroy his creation, saving only the righteous Noah to reestablish the relationship between man and God. The ancestral history tells of the prehistory of Israel, God's chosen people. At God's command Noah's descendant Abraham journeys from his birthplace into the God-given land of Canaan, where he dwells as a sojourner, as does his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob. Jacob's name is changed to Israel, and through the agency of his son Joseph, the children of Israel descend into Egypt, 70 people in all with their households, and God promises them a future of greatness.
caption: First Day of Creation (from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle)
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